The art of being independent
Posted on December 15th, 2009 in Division Events, University life | Comments Off
Yesterday, the Division International Studies welcomed Mr Thomas Awe, Director of the Shanghai Office of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation for a public lecture on the activities of the foundation in China. The Konrad-Adenauer Foundation is a so-called political foundation, one of the six party foundations in Germany, and the debate over what is to be meant by “political” quickly took centre stage.
In Germany all political foundations but one were inaugurated after World War II and they are since then playing an important role in political education, explained Mr Awe. The rational behind this was the assumption that the lack of civic culture in Germany was one of the main causes of such extraordinary and brutal acts of destructiveness as the killing 6 Million people of Jewish origin and of about another 2 Million people considered “unworthy lives” in concentration camps, or as the launch of the bloodiest modern war with about 55 Million dead. A famous testimony of the hypothesis of political culture was Gabriel Almond’s and Sydney Verba’s study “The Civic Culture: A Study of Five Nations” where the authors found through survey methods that the political culture in Germany, Spain and Italy was less “civic” than in the US or UK. The study is not only a groundbreaking work of political science which established the dominance of behaviouralist methods in the discipline, it also caused wide-spread debate and critical reflection on complex concepts such as political culture and its influence on state institutions and politics. The authors later revised many of their propositions and findings, and notably attenuated their evaluation of Germany’s political culture (The Civic Culture Revisited) but they still remain THE political science reference for the hypothesis that one major cause for the rise of Nazism was the anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-semitic political culture of Weimar Germany. The list of authors who have, in other ways, explored this idea is far too long to reproduce fully here but the question of mentality, knowledge, ideas and unjust politics has troubled the spirits of philosophers, political scientist, sociologists and historians. A list would include such divers authors like Eugen Kogon (The Theory and Practice of Hell), Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), Theodore Adorno (The Authoritarian Personality), Alexander & Margarete Mitscherlich (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour), Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power), or the very disputed Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners).
To avoid a repetition of Nazism, political education became a central part of democracy in Germany. Political education is diffused through foundations like the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, through schools where it constitutes an own subject-matter, through the “Zentrale für politische Bildung” which exists on national and federal level and through a variety of organisations and other foundations, of projects and activities like the Children’s Parliament. Even though not explicitly asked a question hanging in the air at Mr Awe’s presentation was: what is the difference between this kind of political education and pure propaganda? Aware of the sensitive nature of the term “political education” Mr Awe set out to explain that two fundamental principle are to guarantee that political education serves the objective of pluralist dialogue: one, the diversity and variety of actors involved in political education, and two, the independence of the organisations.
Just as there are six different foundations which are close to the six political parties represented in the German parliament, there are many more actors who are involved in political education in Germany and they are all non-governmental actors. Even though each of them follows their own political agenda, it is their collective process of exchanging opinions and thoughts, of debating ideas and concepts, and of dialoguing (sometimes quarrelling) over policies and political values that makes political education different from propaganda. The aim is not to prove any kind of ideological supremacy but to explore collectively and to deliberate collectively about solutions to political problems such as social justice, environmental sustainability, economic stability etc. And they can do so because these actors were independent from the government… despite receiving financial funds from the government.
“But what kind of independence can that be?”, asked many students “if you are receiving funds from the government?” The institutional setting of these organisations’ funding is key to understand their independence. The main point of the financial assistance for non-governmental actors through the state is that they receive money not on the grounds that they follow state directives and policies but because they have a legal
Mr Awe taking critical questions from the audience
entitlement to receive money. In the case of the party foundations like the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, they are allocated money according to the number of seats “their” party has gained in the parliamentary elections which are held every four years. The government has to give this money whether the foundations “behaved properly” or not and it cannot cancel, alter or refuse these payments. These payments are entirely unconnected to what the foundations actually do. The money goes into the foundations’ capital for which they are accountable in yearly financial and fiscal audits (after all it’s the taxpayer’s money). But they are not politically accountable for what they do with their funds! No government institution has the right (it’s a law!) to hold the foundations, or any other non-governmental actors they finance for that matter, politically accountable for what they do. Hence, foundations and other non-governmental actors cannot be sanctioned financially for anything they do. That is what independence means: they are legally protected to receive funds no matter what they do or say. That is the rule of law.
Furthermore, foundations such as the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, do not represent particular interest groups. In this way they are different from specific industrial interest groups for instance. Whereas these lobbies (they are called so because their representatives would wait in the parliament’s lobby for parliamentarians to convince them to defend their particular interests) have clear instructions from their stakeholders and defend specific, narrowly defined interests, foundations and many other non-governmental bodies similar to foundations are held by law to work for the common good and the collectivity. They are non-profit organisations which are not allowed to gain materially from their activities.
So, what are they doing then in China? This was indeed the main topic of Mr Awe’s presentation and a central concern of the students who kept on asking for examples of the foundation’s activities in China. The foundation tries to incite, or rather “ignite” as Mr Awe’s favourite expression goes, the same kind of plural debating culture in the Sino-German context. Here too, experiences, ideas and opinions can be and should be exchanged and debated in the transnational and globalised context of today’s world. Germany, Europe and other countries in the world have political models that can inspire China’s political problem solving and China’s formidable experience of rapid economic and social modernization can teach the world. The Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, and by the way other actors in China like the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, the social-democrat German foundation, see their role as facilitators and enablers of such a dialogue and exchange. One way to do so is to enable the “brain circulation” as Mr Awe called this by offering studentships to Chinese student to pursue studies in Germany but also by organising conferences, seminars and roundtables, through book exhibitions and publications, and, last but not least, through visits throughout the country like the one yesterday at UNNC (the full overview over their activities can be here). Our students indeed grasped the opportunity to discuss and debate during and after the presentation, giving a fine demonstration of the dialogue and critical thinking skills they have learnt at UNNC.
